Wonder Boys

  “A guy? What guy?”

  “A guy named, uh”—I looked over at James—“Vernon Hardapple.”

  Philly slapped another nasty spin on the ball and just missed plunging it into James’s glass again.

  “Hardapple?”

  “He was a matador,” said James, without even looking at me. He readied his next serve. “Love–nine.” With a flourish he put the ball in play.

  “A matador. Named Vernon Hardapple.”

  “He was married to a Mexican,” I said. “He learned it down there.”

  “But she left him.” James slapped one back at Philly, and the ball sailed across the basement and landed in a box of old issues of Commentary. “Love–ten. And I guess he got a little careless in the ring.”

  I couldn’t keep myself from smiling, but James’s face remained perfectly straight, and his eyes were focused on the Ping-Pong ball.

  “He got bored?” said Philly.

  “Just knocked over,” I said, “Broke his hip. End of his career.”

  “So now he fights cars in the Hi-Hat parking lot,” said James. “Your serve.”

  “The old Hi-Hat,” said Philly, spinning his first serve across the net, off the table, and then skittering around the rim of James’s glass. It just missed falling in. Philly Warshaw was death at Beer Pong. “Eleven-zip. Still going there?”

  “Now and then.” All of a sudden I felt a little uneasy. There was something about the incident with Vernon at the Hi-Hat last night that troubled me. Why had he said the car belonged to him, quoting the letters of its license plate, eulogizing as emerald green what I’d always thought of as an unsightly shade of fly butt? I supposed, on reflection, that the car could very well have been his; Happy Blackmore had claimed to have won it in a poker game, but I’d always found this a little hard to believe, given the cosmic extent of the losing streak that Happy’d been on. I’d waited a week for him to bring the certificate of title around before learning through a colleague of his at the Post-Gazette that he was down in the Catoctin Mountains playing out the last foot of thread on his bobbin. “That dude with the big arms still standing there at the door? Cleon? Clement?”

  “He’s still there.”

  “That guy has twenty-two-inch biceps,” he said. “I measured them one time.”

  “Clement let you measure his biceps?”

  Philly shrugged. “I won a bet with him,” he said. He glanced quickly over toward me, then blew another shot past James. “So, Grady, I hear—twelve-zip—I hear you brought us a very special kind of parsley for our Passover dipping tonight.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, looking at James, who blushed. I imagined that he’d felt flattered by Philly’s attentions; no doubt before I showed up he’d been boasting to Philly about what a big dope stud he was. “I’ve got a little bud in the car.”

  “So?”

  “So?” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

  Philly grinned, and then cried out in mock alarm as James succeeded in spattering a lucky shot into his beer. He raised the glass and waggled his eyebrows at me over the rim.

  “Oh. Sure, okay,“ I said, affecting, in classic pothead fashion, a breezy unconcern with the prospect of getting stoned. “If you want.” I was dying for a nice big fatty. I got up and started for the basement door. Philly sent his paddle clattering across the table.

  “Are we stopping?” said James, distressed.

  “Gotta take a leak,” said Philly, starting for the stairs. “I’ll meet you’ns outside.”

  “Come with me, James,” I said, throwing open the creaking cellar doors and starting up the stairs through the cobwebs. Before I could climb out, James gave a tug on the cuff of my trousers.

  “Grady,” he said. “Grady, look.” I ducked back into the basement. He grinned at me and pulled me by my sleeve over to a large, foul-smelling wooden complex of crate lumber and chicken wire that sprawled across the far corner of the basement. He pointed.

  “Snake,” he said;

  Inside the huge pen there was a chunk of dead elm, from which hung a long perfect strand of muscle, draped in decorous pleats, like a streamer. This was Grossman, the nine-foot boa constrictor who, to their considerable regret, had been rooming with the Warshaws for the last twelve years. Philly Warshaw had won Grossman in a Liberty Avenue pool hall during his senior year at Allderdice, then abandoned him to his parents’ care the following fall when he enlisted. Even then, Grossman was not a young snake, and his imminent death had been foretold by veterinarians, and happily anticipated by Irene Warshaw, for as long as Philly had been promising one day to take him back. Still Grossman lived on, in his heated cage, escaping regularly, by means of various herpetical stratagems, to prey on Irene’s ragged tribe of chickens and to leave incredibly foul smelling sculptures of snake dung in artistic locations all over the house.

  I clapped James on the shoulder. “That’s a snake, all right,” I said’

  James knelt down and poked a finger through a hexagon of chicken wire. He made kissing sounds.

  “I think he really likes me,” said James.

  “He does,” I agreed. I tried to remember if I had ever actually seen Grossman move. “I can tell.”

  James followed me up out of the basement and we went around the house to my car, brushing the spider silk from our eyebrows and lips. Evening was coming on. A paisley scarf of purple clouds and sunlight trailed across Ohio to the west. The air was dewy and the grass squeaked under our shoes. There was a smell of horseshit and onions fried in chicken fat. One of the cows out in the barnyard made a mournful comment on the burdensomeness of life. When we had nearly reached the Galaxie, to my surprise James gave a pirate cry and bolted across the last ten feet. He sprang into the air, then, with his arms pressed down against the top of the door, launched himself, as if to vault into the front seat of the open car. He had enough height, I thought, and his trajectory looked good. But at the very last instant he stopped himself and made an emergency two-point landing in the grass. He turned around, his face very serious.

  “I’m having a good time, Professor Tripp,” he said.

  “I’m glad,” I said, reaching past him for the glove compartment. I pulled out the Baggie and the papers and went to work on a joint, rolling it up on a flat stretch of my poor, mutilated hood.

  “They’re nice,” James went on. “That Phil is cool.”

  I smiled. “I know it.”

  “Kind of not too bright.”

  “No,” I said. “But cool.”

  “That’s how I’d want my brother to be,” he said, sounding wistful.

  “Play your cards right and he could be,” I said. “I think they pretty much have an open-door policy around here.”

  “Grady? You don’t have, like, any other real family, do you?”

  “No, I really don’t. A couple of aunts I never see back in my hometown.” I drew the ends taut and pinched them. “And the Wonders, I guess. Goddamn them.”

  “The Wonders?”

  “The brothers in my book. They’re sort of like my brothers.” I sniffed. “I guess that’s the best I can do.”

  “Hey, you know what? I’m the same way!” He raised the back of one hand to his brow and gave his head a tragical toss. “We’re orphans!” he cried.

  I laughed. I said, “You’re drunk.”

  “You’re lucky,” he said, looking up at the house.

  “Think so?” I drew the sweet stripe of adhesive gum across the tip of my tongue.

  His eyes met mine, and to my surprise I discovered in them a hint of pity.

  “Grady, you know how that guy was talking last night about, you know, having a double? Who goes around wrecking his life for him? So that he’ll have plenty to write about?” He was looking at the impression of a pair of buttocks stamped into the hood of my car. “Did you think that was all bullshit?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m afraid I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t either,” he said.

  “Gra-dy! Jay-ames!??
? It was Irene, calling us from the porch. “It’s time!”

  “We’ll be right there!” said James. “I guess Philly’s not coming out.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “It’s kind of hard to be all wild and slip out into the yard for a doobie when you’re an old married man like he is.”

  “A husband.”

  “A husband,” I said, lighting the joint and taking that first long piney sip of smoke. I passed it to James. “Here.”

  James hesitated for a moment, holding the lit end of the joint under his nose, sniffing at it speculatively.

  “Should I?”

  “Go for it.”

  “All right.” He lifted the joint in the air and nodded to me, as if raising a glass of wine for a toast. “To the Wonder brothers.” He took a very long and ambitious drag, then coughed it all out. “I don’t know about this stuff,” he said.

  “Whys that?”

  “It kind of makes me feel like everything already happened five minutes ago.”

  “Everything did.”

  He took another, smaller puff, and let it rattle around inside of him for a minute. He looked up at the house Irv Warshaw had built, at the rope of honeysuckle coming unbraided along its front porch, at the shapes of people moving back and forth across its bright windows.

  “I guess I’m pretty happy,” he said, so flatly and as if to himself that I didn’t even bother to reply.

  AS A JEW, EMILY was never more than sporadically observant, and in the course of our marriage my view, as a gentile observer, of the annual transit of Jewish holidays across their queer lunar calendar, with all their byzantine statutes and elusive significance, had come to resemble my view, as a baseball fan, of the great test matches of the cricket schedule. But I’d always had a soft spot for Passover. I liked the fakery and slyness that went into preparing the food, the way the ubiquitous “bread of affliction” was magically transformed in the Passover repertoire into something manifold and rich—matzoh cakes, matzoh stuffing, matzoh pudding and noodles—like some humble, abundant mammal cherished by Indians for its flesh, hide, bones, organs, and fat. I liked the way the Jewish religion seemed, on the whole, to have devoted so much energy and art to finding loopholes in its crazy laws; I liked what this seemed to me to imply about its attitude toward God, that dictatorial and arbitrary old fuck with his curses and his fiats and his yen for the smell of burnt shoulder meat. In addition to all of this, I’d noticed over the years that I got a strong feeling of satisfaction from sitting down to eat a mad meal of parsley, bones, hard-boiled eggs, crackers, and salt water with a bunch of Jews, three of them Korean. It reassured me that, if nothing else in life, at least I’d fulfilled my earliest ambition simply to wander far afield, in spirit if not in space, from the place of my birth.

  In our town, when I was growing up, there were only seven Jews. There were the five Glucksbringers: the ancient Mr. Louis P., who by the time I was a boy had long since retired to the Stamps and Coins department of the store on Pickman Street he’d founded fifty years before; his son, Maurice; Maurice’s wife, whose name I have forgotten; and their children, David and Leona. There was Mr. Kaplan, who bought Weaver’s Drugs when I was in junior high, and a pretty redheaded woman, married to one of the professors at Coxley, who attended the Episcopal church, and celebrated Christmas, but was known to be a Kaufmann from Pittsburgh. Then my father killed David Glucksbringer, leaving six. It often occurred to me to wonder if I had married into the Warshaw family in part as a way to atone for that terrible subtraction. The Warshaws, too, had lost a son; and the first year I joined them at the Seder table (Irv, Irene, Deborah, Emily, Phil, and Uncle Harry, Irv’s brother, who died the next year of prostate cancer) I took the seventh chair.

  This year there were eight of us, requiring two leaves in the dinner table, so that through an architectural miscalculation of Irv’s, which Irene never let him forget, the dining room was too small to hold us all. Irene had to push back the easy chairs, coffee tables, and floor lamps, and squeeze us all into the living room, which took up the entire front half of the house, from the cracked and blackened fieldstone fireplace to the steep, cockeyed set of stairs that led up to the bedrooms. They’d brought all their belongings with them when they moved from the house on Inverness, and now they spent half their time rearranging the furniture and irritably tripping over footstools. They’d gone in for Danish modern in a big way during its heyday and everything was glass and black leather and abstract expanses of teak and mahogany, while the interior of the house itself was all fir flooring and knotty pine walls, yellow and splintery. Irene was always threatening to sell their old things and buy more appropriate furnishings, but they’d been here for five years now and not a hassock had been shown the door. I always figured that keeping the house jammed with reminders of their old life in Pittsburgh was both a sentimental act on Irene’s part and a gesture of protest.

  When James and I came in from the yard, Irv was already installed at the head of the table, nearest the fireplace, propped up on a sofa cushion. Philly, in a starched shirt with a button-down collar, his spiky hair slicked back with water, was sitting on Irv’s left. They were going through a shoe box filled with yarmulkes, reading the inscriptions and trying to recollect the various afternoons and ceremonies therein commemorated. I could hear the irritable whispering of Marie and Irene in the kitchen, each advising the other not to panic, but the two Warshaw daughters were nowhere to be seen. They were off together someplace, upstairs or outside, conferring, conspiring, helping each other dress. I felt a nasty little thrill of foreboding.

  “Andrew … Ab … Andrew Abraham,” Irv said, holding a blotchy purplish beanie at arm’s length and frowning at the faded legend imprinted in the lining. “July … something, 1964. That’s your cousin Andy.”

  “No kidding”

  “Brother, I remember that one. It was up in Buffalo. Did they have gnats, God, it was awful.”

  Philly grinned and waggled his eyebrows at us as we joined them at the table. “Gnats, huh?” He reached into the box and pulled out a crisp gold yarmulke. “Did they get up your nose? I hate that. Hey, dudes, how are you?”

  “Hi,” James and I said, not quite simultaneously, and then the three of us all burst out laughing. Irv looked up, startled, trying to see what the joke was. He reached for a couple of yarmulkes and handed them to me and James.

  “Up your nose,” he said, as he handed James a black yarmulke and me a royal blue one, studying our faces with his engineer’s eye. “In your mouth, in your ears, it was awful. Here you are, James. Grady.”

  “Thanks,” said James. His face as he examined the little black skullcap was at once dubious and respectful, as if Irv had handed him a miraculous tortilla on which the face of a saint was said to have appeared.

  “Phillip and Marie Warshaw,” Philly read from the inside of the gold yarmulke. “May 11, 1988.” He cocked his head to one side and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “I think I was at that one. Wasn’t that the one where the groom’s father and the bride’s uncle got into a huge argument about Arnold Shoneberger and were yelling so loud at each other that all the babies in the room started to cry?”

  Resisting, somehow, the urge to correct Philly’s mispronunciation, Irv buried his chin in his hand and said nothing. He had worked all his life to deserve the reputation of a measured and reasoning person, and I knew it pained him to recall that devotion to his old hero had exposed him, unalterably, as the kind of man who would pick a fight with the in-laws at a wedding.

  “Bat Mitzvah of—Osnat—Gleberman,” I said, with some difficulty, reading from the inside of my own little hat as I donned it. “February 17, 1979.”

  “Osnat Gleberman?” said Philly. “Who the hell’s that?”

  “I have no idea,” said Irv, with a shrug. “She must have been a friend of yours.”

  “Hey, check it out,” James said, showing us the lining of his black yarmulke. “Mine says, ‘Dawidov Funeral Home.’”

  “Oy
, here,” said Irv, proffering the shoe box. “You can pick another one.”

  “No, thanks,” said James, and he clamped the black beanie onto the back of his head.

  “I never had any friends named Osnat,” said Philly indignantly, rhyming it, as had I, with the name of the little insect that ruined Andy Abraham’s Buffalo bar mitzvah.

  “I believe it’s pronounced ‘oh-SNOT,’” said Irv, raising a pedantic finger, and the three of us burst out laughing again. “Shush!” He sat up a little in his chair, and pointed his upraised finger at the ceiling. “Here she comes.” There was a faint involuntary timbre of warning in his voice, the way you announce the arrival of a notorious brawler or an ill-tempered child or a woman in a very bad mood.

  We shushed, following with our ears a soft, deliberate creaking of the ceiling as it traveled over our heads and then down the rickety stairs, one by one, finally emerging into the living room in the form of Emily Warshaw. And as forms went, as Julius Marx might have added, this one wasn’t half bad. She was a slight, slender woman, my wife, though broad across the hips, with hair that was always cool to the touch and a face, Crabtree used to say, like Fallingwater, all sharp outcroppings and dramatic angles. Her lips were rouged and her eyelids inked and she was dressed in black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black cardigan sweater. When she saw me she didn’t stop dead, or flee, or suffer a brain hemorrhage, or anything of the sort. She had a single moment of crushing shyness, no more, during which she glanced at James and gave him a practiced friendly smile. Then she walked right over to the empty chair beside me and, to my astonishment, sat down.

  “How are you?” she said, just loud enough for me to hear. Emily had a voice that while soft, and at times even inaudible, was throaty and masculine, like the voice of a man in a crowded room talking on the telephone to a lover. On those rare occasions when she grew emotional it would rise and crack like a teenaged boy’s. She met my gaze for a moment, her expression tender and surprisingly pleased, and then looked away, almost flirtatiously, as if we were strangers seated together by a designing hostess. I guessed that, so far, anyway, Deborah had managed to keep my secret. It was going to be up to me to ruin the evening.